Please, mayor, don’t sabotage a success story

Is new Mayor Bob Filner going to sabotage a San Diego success story? We hope not, but the signs are worrisome.

In 2006, San Diego voters decisively approved Proposition C, which allowed City Hall to invite private companies to bid against units of city employees for the right to provide specific city services. For four years, the City Council’s majority Democrats balked at Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders’ push to implement “managed competition.” Some appeared to do so solely because they were allied with public employee unions. Others had genuine doubts about whether managed comp would save money or provide decent services.

But in September 2010, rules were finally OK’d to guide managed comp, ones that required winning private bids to be at least 10 percent less than employees’ bid. Since then, five services have gone out for bids, and each time city employee units have found savings that enabled them to win the competitions. The result is annual savings of $12.2 million – savings that go a long way in a city that sometimes feels locked in a perpetual budget crisis. Five more service competitions are ready to go, holding the promise to at least double the savings already achieved. This is a policy triumph that reflects both innovation and common sense.

Unfortunately, as Sunday’s front-page U-T story laid out, the mayor isn’t impressed by managed comp. Filner said he wanted to “study the other ones before I go forward with any others.” That is reasonable. But his subsequent comment – “I almost want to call it mismanaged cuts, not managed competition” – suggests his mind is made up.

Fortunately, however, the second most powerful Democrat at City Hall, Council President Todd Gloria, is urging Filner to continue with managed comp. No Democrat has more credibility on this matter, given that Gloria was one of the council members who were skeptical the bidding process could yield real savings while keeping services at an adequate level. “He and I probably started out in the same place on the issue,” Gloria noted.

We hope Filner ends up in the same place as Gloria. City finances may be much sounder than they used to be, but they remain precarious. The independent budget analyst says there could be a deficit of up to $84 million in this fiscal year’s $1.1 billion operating budget.

Unlike the federal government, the city of San Diego can’t print money to put off the decisions required by a budget shortfall, so it will have to find savings. The obvious place to start is with additional managed comp bidding processes, which is also an approach endorsed by city voters. This is why San Diegans should hope that Mayor Filner – as Councilman Gloria did before him – considers managed comp with an open mind.